Matt Stoller at OpenLeft notes that the South is one region of the country that seems to be avoiding the worst of the housing slump.

By region of the country, new home sales fell by 27.1 percent in the Northeast, 22.5 percent in the West and 17.1 percent in the Midwest. Only the South saw an increase in sales, a gain of 7.6 percent.

He links it to the massive subsidies transferred from blue states to red states by the federal government.

But a new analysis in The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, a coffee-table book/political rant by liberal billionaire John Sperling, shows that a fiscal map looks awfully like an electoral map. (Lest you think this is all just liberal bias, the right-leaning Tax Foundation supplies similar data.) Between 1991 and 2001, "winner" states got nearly $1 trillion more in federal benefits than they paid in taxes. Alabama won the biggest, raking in $100 billion. Losers California, New York, and Illinois each paid $250 billion or so more than they got back. The huge gaps are driven by higher average incomes in the "donor" states, plus subsidies for farms, oil, mining--"extractive" industries that skew red. There are exceptions (Texas is a loser, Pennsylvania a winner), but the map on this page shows the big picture. The heist is more impressive considering that the winners have only a third of the U.S. population.

This is one reason why I suggest that a libertarian Democrat should run on abolition of the host of the environmentally harmful subsidies related to farming and mining. It would not only protect the environment and cut spending, but would pull the rug out from under the conservative base.

Or is Stoller off in his assumptions? Housing values are also lower in the red states than the blue states. Maybe all those subsidies aren't doing much anyway.